Abstract
In the blood pump development, such as artificial heart or extracorporeal circulation pump, the most important property is the hemocompatibility to prevent thrombus formation that can be investigated from the fluid mechanical point of view. The mechanism of the thrombus formation is that the blood coagulation factor is activated by high shear or foreign body reaction and that it proceeds to cause thrombus formation in low shear and stagnant region. Therefore, the risk of the thrombus formation in the artificial heart and the extracorporeal circulation pump can be predicted by the quantitative evaluation of the flow stagnation inside the pumps with the fluid mechanical methodology such as quantitative flow visualization and the computational fluid dynamic analysis. In this manuscript, the role of the flow visualization in the development of artificial heart and extracorporeal circulation pump with focusing the risk of thrombus formation.
